Encarna Paso

A Spanish music hall performer gets caught up in espionage during the First World War.

Juan is the handsome, irresponsible, best-loved second son. When his older brother, who runs the family's black-market business with their steel-willed mother, marries Juan's lover Ana, Juan heads for Madrid to work for Franco. Juan also leaves behind his impoverished cousin, Ángela, pregnant with his son. Jump ten years. Juanito, the lad, has rheumatic fever. The doctor says to pamper the boy. Ángela, Ana, and his grandmother comply. As Juanito recovers, his father returns in desperate need of cash; Juanito witnesses a theft blamed on his innocent mother. Things come to a head at a saint's-name party for father and son. Jealousies, betrayals, and a bullet converge.

Director José Luis Garci has turned his camera inward on filmmakers and screenwriters to portray them as so self-absorbed in the creative process that there is no other world, no other human relationship that can compete. As José (Adolfo Marsillach) and Federico (Jesus Puente) work together on a new screenplay, their interactions with their family (José's teen daughters, Federico's wife) disappear under the all-consuming task of creation. The daughters give up and go off on their own, and the wife joins a convent while Federico barely notices. And when the producer is interrupted by profound grief at the sudden death of his older son, he almost automatically returns to thinking about the film project when the funeral has ended. Garci honors many great directors at the beginning of this film, and the film continues to play out as an elaboration on this homage -- an illustration both of the dedication and the cost of filmmaking, no judgments given.

When the single middle-aged Luis travels from Barcelona to bury the remains of his mother in the vault of his family in Segovia, he is lodged by his aunt Pilar in her old house where he spent his summer of 1936 with her. He meets his cousin Angelica, who was his first love, living on the first floor with her husband and daughter, and he recalls his childhood in times of the Spanish Civil War entwined with the present.